Hello and Happy New Year - is it okay to say that now? I'm not sure where the cut-off point is. Some people still have their Christmas trees up. We had ours out before New Year. Welcome back to What We've Been Playing! Or as I like to call this particular edition of it: What We Played Over Christmas, because it's been a couple of weeks since we've talked.
Hello and welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing. This week, Kelsey discovers the joys and stresses of managing border control in Papers, Please; Tom holds off his Kojima dislike and plays Death Stranding; Victoria looks for anyone she can to talk to about Dispatch; Ed can't stop thinking about balls; Connor finds himself back in Guild Wars 2; and Bertie finds himself back in Dungeons & Dragons, getting everyone in trouble again.
At the tail end of 2024 the original PlayStation turned 30 years old. While the Xbox 360 is only hitting 20 and it's not an industry shaker to the degree the PS1 was, there's no doubt it earned its place as one of the most important consoles of all time. Xbox managed to challenge Sony in the traditional home console space the PlayStation had dominated with PS1 and PS2, and the console's brilliant line-up of games played a major role in that.
Back in 2007, I was taking my A-level exams. For both English Literature and Drama, I came out with A*s. I'm still quite proud of this, which you can probably tell from the fact I'm bringing it up all these years later - but there's a reason I'm bringing this up beyond the chance for a belated humble brag: I owe my full-scoring papers, weirdly, to BioShock.
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